Last year I took a group of high school students to UC
Berkeley to interact with skeptics. After spending an evening with S.A.N.E
(Students for a Non-religious Ethos), I found myself in a conversation with an
undergraduate student about the existence of free will. She told me that she
recently embraced determinism and rejected free will.

In response to my query about why she changed her mind, she appealed to genetics, background
forces, and environmental factors. In other words, she believed there is no
free will because external forces determine beliefs. What she didn’t realize
was that the justification she offered for her belief in determinism undermined
her deterministic beliefs. She believed that she had evaluated the evidence and
embraced the position—determinism—that is most logical. And yet if determinism
were true she would have been incapable of evaluating evidence and freely following the logic because all her
choices were already set. Logically speaking, her position was self-refuting.
In other words, she sawed off the branch she was sitting on.

The following Associate Press article appeared in my hometown newspaper, The Staten Island Advance, on Sunday, May 24, 2009. I thought it was great and expressed my impressions every time I hear folks like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al interviewed or read from their respective books.

For the record, I don't believe in atheists. I don't believe they actually exist. To be so angry at something requires that one believes it exists. Atheists are too angry at God to actually believe He doesn't exist.